The quality of service and network is also widely different and varied. Hetzner are awesome for the cost, don't get me wrong. But at times their network is terrible and their service seems to vary hugely.
You don't get these problems with Softlayer, you pay significantly more and get significantly better almost-guaranteed service.
If you're looking for tier-1 network traffic, 100tb.com is with Softlayer, and since they have so many servers, they get massive discounts and can give you 100TB of softlayer traffic for relativly cheap.
You don't get these problems with Softlayer, you pay significantly more and get significantly better almost-guaranteed service.